Welcome! My name is Peyman Asadzade. I am a Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative and a former Postdoctoral Fellow with the School’s Managing the Atom project (2023–2024). I was also a USIP Peace and Security Scholar during 2021-2022.

I study the micro-foundations of security politics: how citizens and elites form preferences and make decisions in environments shaped by conflict, authoritarian governance, and socio-economic insecurity. I use original surveys, experiments, elite interviews, and archival research to study these processes. My book project, Debating the Bomb, examines how nuclear weapons in Iran shifted from a political taboo to a contested and increasingly mainstream issue. It shows how civil society activism, elite discourse, and periods of heightened security tension have worked together to challenge long-standing restraints and redefine the boundaries of acceptable nuclear policy.

My articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Foreign Policy Analysis, Research & Politics, International Interactions, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Nations & Nationalism. I have also written articles for the Monkey Cage of the Washington Post, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Middle East Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Online Exclusives of the Journal of Democracy. I served as replication analyst at the Journal of Politics during 2021-2022. I am also the recipient of the 2022 Palmer Prize from the Peace Science Society (International).